Type brasssmile com into a search box and you probably expect braces, aligners, maybe a booking page for a clinic. The name pushes hard in that direction. What loads instead is a general blog covering gadgets, business and everyday living, with no dental service behind it. This audit covers the content, the ownership record, the server findings and the lookalike domains worth avoiding. What Brasssmile Com Actually Is Brasssmile com is an advert-funded publishing site. The articles cover tec...

Building an AI-enabled application using the Copilot SDK, C#, .NET, and Nuxt UI Building an AI-enabled application using the Copilot SDK, C#, .NET, and Nuxt UI

This is the fifth client I work with this week who’s auto-replied to an email I sent with this: I am currently on leave returning on the 17th of August. I don’t think I’ve ever had two clients from disparate companies share leave, at least outside popular holidays like Lunar New Year or Xmas. And now five people have? MAMBO NO. 5!? What’s going on? Is there some awesome event going on now to which I wasn’t invited? Do they know something we don’t? If a massive new ...

Printing Lists Aug 14, 2026 To print a comma-separated list, a concise idiom is to optionally print the comma first, before the element: for (items, 0 ..) | item, item_index | { if (item_index > 0 ) std.debug.print( ", " ); std.debug.print( "{}" , .{item}) } Printing Lists Aug 14, 2026 To print a comma-separated list, a concise idiom is to optionally print the comma first, before the element: for (items, 0 ..) | item, item_index | { ...

0.0 Context Setting Tuesday August 11, 2026 in Portland Oregon. The freezer isn’t working. It’s super irritating. We’ve tried a whole bunch of stuff (I got the multimeter out!) and we’re getting to the point where it’s time to call someone out to take a look at it. I’m not ready to do the switchover quite yet, but a much better archive and home for this newsletter (still powered by Buttondown !) will be launching at thingsthatcaughtmyattention.com . Let me know what you thin...

In the month of April my car was in the shop three times. It was supposed to be one trip (O2 sensor, emissions, tires), but it wound up being divided into three because of some unavailability on my part and the mechanics’, combined with a slight delay on parts I ordered. Anyway, I got it back and figured I’d be done with that stuff for a bit. Within 24 hours I was jacking it up to see if a wheel bearing was bad, and within 48 hours I was riding back in a tow truck. In the month of April my ...

Enjoying Idaho while ignoring Illinois Today is the first day of my life that I am unemployed. And not by choice. As I mentioned on LinkedIn last week, me and about 160 of my colleagues, staff and faculty, untenured and tenured, lost our positions at Illinois Tech after they declared "financial exigency" which allows them to eliminate tenured positions. I'll use this post to tell my story, but keep in mind there are 160 other ones. The president announced that he would be asking the board to d...

Tigris has a pretty advanced replication scheme for writes. What happens when you actually need to delete things? Turns out deleting things is hard in distributed systems. Especially when you have a geo-replicated active-active database like Tigris does. We can (and do) use tombstones to mark where data once was, but how do you let people undo an accidental delete? Tigris wants to turn storage inside out , so our implementation of soft d...

This is the second installment of my look under the hood of the recently passed 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, looking at what each provision actually does and trying to suss out its actual impact on housing supply. You can read my previous essay on Title I of the Act here . This time I’ll look at Title II, “Building More in America,” and Title III, “Manufactured Housing For America,” which have 13 and 4 individual provisions respectively. Some of the most consequential chunks of t...

This blog is the first in a series exploring the technologies and principles shaping the future of AI and autonomy. In a contested environment, yesterday’s software is rarely enough for tomorrow’s mission. Autonomy has to be adaptable by the operator as the mission changes. Historically, changing how an autonomous system behaves has meant changing its software. An operator identifies a gap, then engineers modify the code, retest, recertify as required, and redeploy. The process exists for...

After reading Chris Fallin’s aegraph post , new ZJIT contributor dak2 landed a block-local version of the canonicalize function in #16828 . The pseudocode of the block-local canonicalize function looks like this: for block in function . reverse_post_order (): rewrite_map = {} for insn in block . insns : insn . operands . map_in_place ( lambda o : rewrite_map . get ( o , o )) if insn . opcode == "GuardType" : re...

AI-assisted programming is fast evolving and there is a tension between ‘we no longer need to understand the code’ and ‘what is my purpose as a programmer’. I recorded a short video on this topic with how I think the tension can result in conflicts. AI-assisted programming is fast evolving and there is a tension between ‘we no longer need to understand the code’ and ‘what is my purpose as a programmer’. I recorded a short video on this topic with how I think the tension can ...

Thanks to a lot of hard work by Liz Neeley , I had a chance to run the project closure workshop online yesterday. I think it went pretty well, and I really enjoyed meeting all the participants, but as the saying goes, no lesson survives first contact with learners. In particular, there’s a lot of duplication, and I think I need to reorganize the material in a 2x2 scheme: Sudden Gradual Project Continues Emergency planning Success planning Project Ends Abrupt closure Deliberate closu...

Something I’ve noticed recently is that I am no longer able to read and parse PR titles and descriptions across the internet. I don’t think I stopped being able to read or understand code, but now that we are automatically generating more and more explanatory artifacts instead of writing them, navigating codebases as a human is becoming an exercise in futility. I’m not the only one: We are already constantly drowning in tech jargon, much of which comes to us presented through brea...

A few people I know have a style guide for their blog/website, so here are my thoughts on a Style Guide for this site. Read more on the site… A few people I know have a style guide for their blog/website, so here are my thoughts on a Style Guide for this site. Read more on the site… A few people I know have a style guide for their blog/website, so here are my thoughts on a Style Guide for this site. Read more on the site… Read more on the site…

Every time a new open-weight AI model is released, people say that local models are the future. Why spend billions of dollars building out datacenters when everyone will just be able to run AI models on their laptops or phones? I think this idea is doomed. No matter how strong open-weight models get, most inference will always happen in AI datacenters. Local models are too weak to be widely used Local models are never going to be as powerful . I think this point should be obvious: all of t...

One of my favourite things to do online is perusing the IndieWeb . It's fun, and I've been able to discover a tonne of interesting people along the way. But every now and then, I come across someone who has published their salary history on their site. At first, I thought this was a great idea. It feels transparent, and it theoretically gives people an idea of what they could or should be earning in a particular field. But as I've discovered more people doing this (for the record, I've only s...

Craft launched from Luna, no tether can go farther, faster while being lighter Exploring more worlds with joy and curiosity hosting ideas, deploying empathy and even skepticism for humanity From the edge of a gravitational well they can push the discourse and shape its course All of these futures can bloom with the fervor and fragrance of you. Illustration of a rocket taking off from a Moonbase. Image: SpaceX Poem notes: I love writing poetry where words allude to technical space themes. It...

(what if) home pages (were, are) ever-changing poems(?) (what if) home pages (were, are) ever-changing poems(?) (what if) home pages (were, are) ever-changing poems(?)

Notes from 13 sessions on evals, context, and systems. 9.5 hours of talks distilled into about 20 minutes of reading. Notes from 13 sessions on evals, context, and systems. 9.5 hours of talks distilled into about 20 minutes of reading.

Fiction Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino . Beautiful prose and imagination. By Night in Chile by Roberto Bolaño . Beautiful and surreal prose, but completely unpretentious. Valuable Humans in Transit and Other Stories by qntm . I had already read most of these but they are very, very good, and it was a pleasure to read them again. ⭐️ Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman . Usually when I hear “it’s a 900 page Russian epic about three generations of a family living throu...

Introduction In the Livelymerge project, Dan Ingalls, Peter van Hardenberg, and I (Alex Warth) are building a Lively Kernel-like system whose heap is an Automerge document. (See my previous lab note for the details of our object model.) The whole point of this arrangement is that every object is persistent and shared: if you and I are looking at the same document, we’re looking at the same objects, and they’ll still be there two weeks from now. It didn’t take much multi-user testin...

My colleagues at Thoughtworks tend to be big fans of Test-Driven Development, and many people in the industry advocate telling LLM agents to use TDD when building software. Birgitta Böckeler was curious if this really makes a difference, so conducted a few experiments . more… My colleagues at Thoughtworks tend to be big fans of Test-Driven Development, and many people in the industry advocate telling LLM agents to use TDD when building software. ...